Alaska
Villagers rush to aid rural plane crash survivors
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Residents of a rural Alaska village reached survivors of a commuter plane crash two hours after the aircraft went down in freezing rain, authorities said Saturday.
The pilot and three passengers died in the crash of the single-engine turboprop Cessna 208. At least six passengers were transported for medical treatment. There was no report of fire. Few other details, including the possible cause of the crash in freezing rain, are known, said National Transportation Safety Board investigator Clint Johnson.
The Hageland Aviation flight crashed around 6:30 p.m. 4 miles from Saint Marys, and rescuers reached the scene at 8:30 p.m., he said.
Pilot Terry Hansen and passengers Rose Polty, Richard Polty and Wyatt Coffee, an infant, died in the crash, Alaska State Troopers said. The survivors included Melanie Coffee, Pauline Johnson, Kylan Johnson, Tonya Lawrence, Garrett Moses and Shannon Lawrence. Their ages and hometowns were not immediately available.
Saint Marys, like scores of other Alaska villages, is off the state road system. People routinely use small aircraft to reach regional hubs where they can catch jets to complete trips to Anchorage or other cities.
New York
Ex-New York Observer editor Kaplan dies at 59
NEW YORK – Peter Kaplan, former editor of The New York Observer who hired a then-unknown Candace Bushnell to write a column called “Sex and the City,” has died. He was 59.
Kaplan died Friday of cancer in New York City, said his wife, Lisa Chase.
He edited the Observer from 1994 to 2009. The salmon-colored weekly has a reach beyond its circulation of about 50,000 because it is read by the Manhattan-based movers and shakers it covers.
Kaplan was credited with honing the paper’s snarky tone and with hiring writers who became influential voices of their era.
Bushnell’s column about love and dating inspired the hit HBO series “Sex and the City” starring Sarah Jessica Parker.
“The more cancellations we got for her column,” Kaplan wrote in New York magazine in 2011, “the more the paper knew we had hit the jackpot.”
California
Man awaiting murder trial ate Ajax, lawyer says
SANTA ANA, Calif. – A man ate cleanser that he apparently collected slowly while in custody and died while awaiting trial in the killings of four homeless men and two others, his lawyer said.
The lawyer, Michael Molfetta, who was briefed on the death, said Friday that the incident raises serious questions about Orange County jail deputies’ supervision of Itzcoatl Ocampo, who was mentally ill.
Ocampo, a 25-year-old former Marine, was found shaking and vomiting in his single-man cell Wednesday and taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead a day later, sheriff’s Lt. Jeff Hallock said.
No cause of death was immediately given, and officials said an autopsy will be performed in the coming days, but Molfetta said investigators believe Ocampo waited until he accumulated enough Ajax industrial cleaner for a lethal dose, then ingested it.
Utah
Romney’s son says he helped people in crash
SALT LAKE CITY – Josh Romney says he was first on the scene after a vehicle crashed into a house Thanksgiving night in suburban Salt Lake, and he helped four people from the wreckage.
The son former presidential candidate Mitt Romney told the Salt Lake Tribune that an SUV came “right past our car and into a house.”
He said he was on the way home with his wife and children from Thanksgiving dinner with his parents when the car slammed into the kitchen area of the Holladay home.
The paper reports that Romney said in a statement that he “was able to help each of them get out of the car and lift them down to the ground.”
He also tweeted about the wreck Friday, along with a picture of himself next to the vehicle: “Was first on scene to big accident, see pic of car in the house. I lifted 4 people out to safety. All OK. Thankful.”
Associated Press
